What I want in a Facebook bot

With all the hype whirling around bots these days, and Facebook’s impending bot API/Store announcement, I thought I’d throw out a few ideas on how I think they should work.

Passive conversation tracking. I feel like text commands is bad UX and having any sort of consumer product with a learning curve seems like a path to low adoption. It would be good UX if FB allowed users to auth any bot in their store and have them passively track my conversations within Messenger. If I’m making plans to godo something with a group of friends (e.g. counts chat participants pings Uber, OpenTable), go see a movie (Flixster), or share an awesome song with my friend (Spotify), these bots would listen and throw up a UI. The absence of overt inputs will be the thing that makes these bots convenient.

Let M relay all the messages. Having different bots chime in with their respective features seems like a noisy, interruptive experience. I can assume the more I use a single bot, the more rapport we’ll develop and the more I’ll be able to depend on it. A virtuous cycle indeed.

M recommends its friends. This will solve the bot discovery issue which is something the app store has never really nailed. I can see this making bot development more compelling than app development in certain instances. That is, until the app store becomes a bot too.